Lloyd Axworthy delivered a speech for the Oct 29 Compton Lecture that did not live up to the academic standards I was expecting. His argument's foundational claim was that the international community does not intervene in humanitarian crises such as Syria because it views the sovereignty of the nation state as outweighing the atrocities committed by that nation state. He went on to argue that this arrangement should change and one solution would be to maintain a standing UN military force. I was frankly baffled to hear his claim regarding sovereignty. Would he truly expect us to take at face value the assertion that the so-called sanctity of the nation state has been upheld in recent years?
US foreign policy in relation to the war on terror in the Middle East region speaks for itself. From the Bush administration’s ill-conceived interventions, still plaguing the region today, to Obama’s illegal drone campaign, US policy has done anything but respect the sanctity of the nation state. In fact, US policies have contributed to political instability in the region, as is acknowledged by top officials such as U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who stated to Al Jazeera in July that, "When you drop a bomb from a drone … you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good." The interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan, besides involving “international” coalition forces, both invoked the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention. While I’ve discussed US foreign policy primarily, the international community has been largely complicit in this disrespect of sovereignty, that is, the sovereignty of all but the US and its allies.
If indeed global crises are increasingly intersectional as Axworthy argues (an observation with which I agree) we should be asking ourselves such questions as: how do indiscriminate drone attacks radicalize and reproduce violence? How are US relations with regimes such as the Saudi’s problematic if we claim to support human rights? How is the UN complicit in the destabilization of the region by its refusal to acknowledge the US’s violation of international law? Perhaps most importantly, why are some interventions allowed and others not?
By focusing exclusively on dictators such as Assad, Axworthy creates an apolitical narrative, which ignores a deep history of violence. We could ask how legacies of the Arab Spring, economic exploitation, the Cold War, both World Wars and colonialism impact violence in the region today. These are profoundly complex questions; however, they weren’t so much as addressed in the analysis. The sanctity-of-sovereignty argument that was presented reduces the narrative of violence to the indiscriminate violence of the Arab, the Muslim, the Other. It defines this violence as one that must be uprooted by the benevolent hand of us enlightened, western humanitarians.
Many will say, “Okay, but we have to do something.” Indeed, a humanitarian crisis of such proportion necessitates some response. But any reasonable response requires an engagement with difficult ethical, historical, and political issues. I expected to hear some engagement with those issues and was profoundly disappointed. Instead I heard an argument claiming that, as these problems wash up on our shores, we have to take action, which also happens to be, quite conveniently, ethical and humane. Galvanizing humanitarian zeal within such a problematic contextualization of the issues will only serve to reproduce their root causes. If some readers find this opinion abrasive, I would challenge them to engage in the issues. The continuation of Axworthy’s ahistorical narrative however, is problematic for DePauw as an institution claiming to be rigorously academic. Any discussion of possible action must be predicated on a critical engagement with relevant and challenging questions. Let’s begin that difficult conversation.
Stanton is a senior music major from Westminster, Maryland.